Recommendation

Congress should allocate a share of federal research funding to promote technology transfer and commercialization, such as through a “Spurring Commercialization of Our Nation’s Research” program.

Details

The federal system for funding research pays too little attention to commercializing technology and is still based on the linear model that assumes basic research gets easily translated into commercial activity. To address this, the administration should work with Congress to establish an automatic set-aside program that allocates a modest percentage of federal research budgets to technology-commercialization activities. For instance, Congress could allocate 0.15 percent of agency research budgets to fund university, federal laboratory, and state government technology-commercialization and innovation efforts. The funds could be used to provide: 1) “commercialization capacity-building grants” to institutions of higher education pursuing specific initiatives to improve their capacity to commercialize faculty research, and 2) “commercialization-accelerator grants” to support institutions of higher education pursuing initiatives that allow faculty to directly commercialize research in an effort to accelerate research breakthroughs.

Keep reading:

▪ Stephen Ezell and Robert D. Atkinson, “25 Recommendations for the 2013 America COMPETES Act Reauthorization” (ITIF, April 2013), https://itif.org/publications/2013/04/22/25-recommendations-2013-america-competes-act-reauthorization.

Updates

A version of this idea is being implemented through the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (NSF TIP).